Aubin: Mayor should reject troubling recommendations

Henry Aubin, The Gazette05.29.2013

Montreal mayor Michael Applebaum speaks at a press conference in Montreal as Jacques Leonard (left), head of a committee set up to examine the tendering and awarding of municipal contracts listens to him Wednesday, May 8, 2013. The findings of the committee were released at the conference

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MONTREAL — Sometimes it’s easy to wonder how serious Montreal city hall is about cleaning up its sleazy act.

What prompts this skepticism are two of the 60 recommendations in this month’s high-powered report on municipal reform that Mayor Michael Applebaum commissioned. If adopted, both of these little-publicized recommendations would have the effect of making it even harder to crack down on wasteful practices, including corruption and collusion. Yet the mayor has endorsed the report as a whole.

One recommendation in this report, made by an independent panel headed by Lévesque government minister Jacques Léonard, would effectively wreck the ethics “hotline” — the channel through which city employees can report improper practices.

To be sure, the Tremblay administration in 2010 had already damaged the credibility of the hotline’s confidentiality. Until then, the staff of the city’s auditor-general’s bureau had taken calls from whistleblowers. That body is independent of both the civil service hierarchy and of partisan politics: It’s subordinate only to city council, and it would take a two-thirds vote of its members to oust an auditor-general. Employees who reported irregularities knew their superiors would not learn of their whistleblowing and punish them.

What the mayor, Gérald Tremblay, did was strip that neutral body of this task and hand it to the comptroller-general — an official whose ultimate boss is the city manager and who naturally tends to be sensitive to that boss’s distaste for the embarrassments that a hotline can produce. City employees showed what they thought of the switch by clamming up: The number of calls on the hotline plummeted from 131 in 2010, when the auditor-general was in charge, to 33 the following year under the comptroller-general.

Léonard’s recommendation would now go further: He would make the comptroller-general report to the mayor’s executive committee. That means the mayor would be the ultimate recipient of whistleblowers’ reports. Mayors are even more scandal-phobic than city managers and they, too, can have ways to derail someone’s career. This politicizing recommendation, then, would strip the hotline of its last molecule of credibility.

But this recommendation’s implications go far beyond the ethics hotline.

The comptroller-general’s bureau, with its more than 20 employees, is a true investigative body: It was set up three years ago to probe the civil service for irregularities, audit contracts, oversee contract work and stick its nose into where it shouldn’t — as it did so several years when hacking the emails of that pesky auditor-general, Jacques Bergeron.

Now this force would be the arm of the political clique running the city. The potential for abuse is plain. It would be hysterical to liken this to the KGB, but the structural parallel is there.

The Léonard report’s other troubling recommendation would jeopardize the all-important independence of the auditor-general’s bureau.

No longer would that 30-member unit be directly accountable to city council — an arm’s-length arrangement that allows the bureau to probe wherever it pleases and rock the boat with impunity (as it did this week with its blistering critique of the city’s under-investment in infrastructure maintenance).

No, it would report to an obscure body called the “comité de vérification” that could ride herd on it. The comité has seven members, five of whom are either city or suburban councillors — the potential for political interference is implicit. Indeed, the last time the comité made the news was when it was revealed that it had been responsible for advising the comptroller-general to hack Bergeron’s emails.

If Applebaum is sincere about wanting to rid city hall of gangrene, he should reject both recommendations — and, while he’s at it, undo Tremblay’s move and restore confidence in the hotline by giving it back to the most credible body, the auditor-general’s bureau.

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